Re: Help with second track
Posted: Tue May 01, 2012 10:26 pm
Thanks Steve - appreciate you taking the time....I was telling TREBOR the other gentleman helping that what i COULD do, is plug my picked up acousticguitar into channel 1, of my M-audio moblepre hardware interface, then on channel 2 i could mic it with an external vocal/audio mic or something,and voila. I was telling him I am so new to this recording stuff,adn a brain injury doesn't help!steve wrote:If you record with a single microphone, or a single plugged in guitar, or any other "single channel" input, the recording is "mono". That's what "mono" means - there is only one audio channel.
A mono recording may be on a single (mono) track, or it may be duplicated so that it is on two channels, but it is still "mono".
If you play a CD of an old (mono) recording then your CD player will play 2 channels. Normal audio CDs always have 2 channels (left and right), but if the original recording is a mono recording then both left and right are identical - it is "2 channel mono".
If you make an audio CD from a mono recording the CD burning program will (*should) automatically duplicate the mono onto both left and right channels - the recording is still mono, but it is on 2 channels because the audio CD format specifies that the audio should always be 2 channels.
(* some very old CD burning programs could not handle making audio CDs from mono audio files but all modern CD burning software should be able to handle mono correctly.)
steve wrote:For "true" stereo, the sound coming out of one speaker is different from the sound coming out of the other.
An example of this may be if you record a guitar and a vocal you may want it to sound as if the guitarist is a little to the left of centre and the singer a little to the right of centre. Even though the guitar track and the vocal track are both single channel (mono) tracks, you can create a "stereo mix".
To do this you would "pan" the guitar track a little to one side, and pan the vocal a little to the other side.
("pan" is like the "balance" control found on many stereo players - it shifts the sound left/right across the stereo field. In Audacity there is a "pan" slider on the left end of each audio track. See here: http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/Audio_Tracks#panel )
If there are off-centre tracks, then when you Export the finished project Audacity will automatically mix down the tracks to a single stereo track.
If you want the recording to sound as if the player is dead centre then there is usually no point in using two channels for a mono recording because it just requires twice as many data bits but sounds identical (each "bit" or data is duplicated).